


welcome, oh summer love

by brevity_ofwit



Series: changing seasons [2]
Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Apologies, Fae Jaskier | Dandelion, M/M, Past Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Stream of Consciousness, he does cry tho! bc witcher's have emotions too!, i'd say it's very monologue-esque in the way that it's just everything Jaskier is thinking/feeling, i've been reading Virginia Woolf and was inspired, imagery heavy, it's more implicit bc gotta stay tru to Geralt's emotional constipation, jaskier's pov, just assume that in everything I ever write about him he's fair folk, the world needs to know, this is also result of a lot of wine and sad guitar music
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-19
Updated: 2020-05-19
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:21:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24278785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brevity_ofwit/pseuds/brevity_ofwit
Summary: After leaving Geralt and making a home in a fairy circle somewhere deep in a forgotten wood, Jaskier learns to move on. He makes a home in that stone ring, detached from the world and his worries. That is, until Geralt stumbles into his ring looking haggard and weary, trailing a lost princess behind him. Should Jaskier stay silent in his tree, let them pass by him as he rests? Will he finally face the love he'd run away from?This is the sequel to 'forced winter'! After many requests, it is finally here. I hope you all enjoy!
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Series: changing seasons [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1752619
Comments: 25
Kudos: 148
Collections: The Witcher Alternate Universes





	welcome, oh summer love

I don’t keep track of the seasons as they pass me by. Summer, autumn, winter, spring; days become weeks that become months. Time doesn’t reach me here. As if the moment I stepped over that stone circle and made a bed of moss in this stump, I’d entered another world entirely. 

Here, everything is different. Like home, like the world I’d travelled with you, but slightly to the left. Before, I’d never felt so in tune with nature. Beneath the blanket of night and treetop, it was like anything else. Beautiful, but removed. I was so focused on you, my heart was dedicated solely to _you_ \-- I hardly noticed that the creaking of the trees was really just a call home. 

But now I _feel_ again. Now, I feel _everything_.

The forest, the sway of wind as it ruffles leaves and bush, the scamper of furry woodland creatures across packed dirt. Damp soil where roots extend deep into the earth, the chill of ozone as wayward branches tickle the underbellies of clouds. There’s a brook in this clearing, too, and I can feel more than hear it’s babble. How cool the water feels pooling just to my side, skipping over stone and step in ceaseless, comforting chatter.

But more than that, it is as if _I_ am the one touching the sky and wiggling my toes in the ground. I am the one these rabbits and deer trod on, I am the one that sways in the breeze, I am the one to speak back to the brook. 

Remember my stump? My most generous host, the one creature to see a lost and broken heart and welcome it home-- oh, what a pair we had made. Two sad, sorry things worn down by a cruel world, barely a shell with what little we had left. While I slept, I had many wondrous dreams in a realm beyond my own. In this, I was able to communicate with my host, and perhaps it was something about the way she’d been cast out, perhaps it was something about the way she’d been forgotten-- but we became one. By magic or by my nature, we fused until there was no sign of a hidden man. In the dream realm, I would be sitting in the shade of a great oak, and in the mortal realm, that is what we became. Something towering, with winding branches every which way and a trunk thicker and sturdier than three men twice my size put together. 

We were marvellous, so full up of life within our ring of stones. The trees outside withered in frost but I could not feel that frigid chill any longer. I was at peace here. And I like to think I could have begun to heal. I could have let myself let go. Your honeyed eyes and wildflower fields on the horizon had long since faded from memory, but there is a pain that lingers in my heart. A clawing numbness like a wild animal; desperate to get out, desperate to be set free. 

In a way, I should have known what that meant. In another way, I should have known that it was only a matter of mending myself before you would show up. 

Of course, I am too busy dreaming to notice at first. The babble of the brook drowns most of you out, but then I hear it. A child’s laugh. An amused grunt. The familiar nicker of a worn-out horse, and then far too many feet clamouring over tree roots for a clearing. And a clearing you find, though I don’t believe you recognise it to be mine. Maybe you know it is a little too green, a little too quiet, a little too perfect. But then you are tired, too much to really care, aren’t you? And that little girl’s voice is so pleading, how can you deny her rest in the first patch of safety you’ve seen in weeks?

I watch you set up camp before me, build a fire, fetch dinner, skin and cook it with such haunting familiarity I want to weep. But I cannot. I can’t risk alerting you to the very tree you’ve taken to leaning against. 

Would you even know it’s me? Would you hear my pretty cries and instantly recognise them, your barker, your travelling companion, your most loyal friend? 

(Am I even that anymore?)

Somewhere between midnight and the third hour, I notice it. _She_ isn’t with you. Of all the effort I’d spent forgetting, I could never quite rid my mind of _her_. Raven locks and a wicked smile, always demeaning and uncomfortably domineering. But tonight there is only you and this child fast asleep. I think maybe I recognise her; if her hair were longer, blonder. If she traded the baggy stableboy look for silk and royalty. But I can’t be sure. 

You fall asleep leaning on me and the hum of your body against my trunk nearly sets me alight. I hear your pulse, the slow, rhythmic cadence of a witcher’s heart. I hear your breaths, feel you rise and fall with them. I think I can hear your dreams, too, the nightmares they’ve always been. I see your reactions clearly, recognise what they mean. The tremor of your body and the way your hands swivel like you’re holding your sword, or blocking a mighty blow. A sharp intake of breath and a furrowed brow. You whimper and then you wake and perhaps it’s for how lost and alone you look as you scan our surroundings that I reveal myself. 

A gentle unfurling of my tree. My bark cracks and it is loud in the quiet of night. My trunk splits down the centre and out, covered in moss and wood chips, I stumble into you. This I think gives you far more fright than the dreams, and I do feel sorry for that, but when you recognise it’s me and a softness overtakes your face, I can feel myself splitting in half all over again. 

How was it that I ever forgot how much I loved you? How was it that you could ever make me feel so many ways-- run through, shattered and bleeding, but so alive? 

Your arms are around me, then. Your hands are touching me, sweeping my sides, smoothing my hair, grasping my shaking shoulders. I almost can’t breathe; I just keep staring at you, the new scar on your sunken cheek, the crop of your dull hair, the glitter in your eye that I’m afraid might be tears. 

Have I made you cry, my love?

“Don’t cry,” I rasp, eyes wet myself. “It’s me, dear heart. It’s me.”

“Why did you go?” 

I don’t answer you. I know you know why I’d gone. Deep down, however buried and repressed, is the answer. So I smile something small and sad and begin to pull away, but to my surprise, you tighten your grip and draw me back in. Press me to your chest and drop your face into my hair, breathing me.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t- I’m sorry,” you say, voice choked up from all the other things I know you want to say. 

I want to be angry. I know I can be, that I should be. But I’ve forgotten exactly how. Instead, I shush you patiently, slipping my arms around you to soothe, then startle with a new revelation. Before, I could never fit my arms around the whole of you. Now, my hands interlace nearly to the wrist. I can feel the scratch of hastily sewn patches and over your shoulder see in the moonlight the scraps of studded armour and a jagged, broken blade. You’ve lost so much, and I can’t tell whose fault it is. Guilt gnaws away at me regardless.

“Coin’s been low,” you say because of course. I forgot how well you knew me. “Been taking whatever jobs to keep us housed and fed before making for the mountains.”

“I’m sorry I left you,” I tell you, still tucked against your form. I need to see your face for this, though, so I draw back despite your efforts. “But I had to. You know I did.”

You nod sadly and that’s when my tears begin to flow in earnest. “I couldn’t do it anymore, Geralt. I couldn’t keep watching you leave me, couldn’t sit around maudlin until you returned. And then you had _her_ and it hurt too much. I couldn’t- I couldn’t do it- I-”

Now you shush me. Pet down my hair and thumb away the wetness on my cheeks. I let you pull me back into your chest, let you rub circles on my back and rock me like a child. When I’ve calmed to the point of not choking on breaths, you guide me back against my old trunk and look me in the eyes. 

“What have I done to you, Jaskier?” you mutter almost distractedly, taking me in. I see myself reflected in your eyes and gasp. Maybe it’s a trick of the light, but I see myself glowing. My skin as I look down to see it is pearlescent. Tinged just slightly blue, emitting light as if I _were_ the moon. I feel up my face and find too-smooth skin, the curve of newly pointed ears, the stub of little horns at my hairline. Perhaps I should have sensed it earlier, but there’s a jaggedness in my mouth that I discover to be two sets of fangs.

“You didn’t do this to me,” I say because it’s the truth. I have always been this, I think, just hidden beneath a glamour. One I didn’t know was placed. “But I _did_ hurt you, and I am sorry for that. Running away was selfish of me. I was only thinking of myself, trying to save _myself_ , and I never thought about how it might affect _you_.”

“I drove you away.” You keep brushing the pad of your thumb against my cheekbone, eyes flicking around my face. Like you’re trying to memorise it. It makes me wonder if you ever loved me back. If you ever could. 

“We drove each other apart,” I compromise, even though a pit in my heart still blames the witch for coming between us. The corner of your mouth quirks like you know, and I smile back sheepishly. Gods above, how I have missed you. 

And to my surprise, you have missed me, too. For a time there was Yennefer, and for a time there was Ciri and Roach after she left. But you were still lonely by their sides. Something was missing, you confess. 

I’m pressed to your side now, your arm slung over my shoulders as we lounge beneath the starlight. You ask me about my clearing. Why the world around us has dimmed in winter but here it’s balmy like a summer night, ungoverned by the laws of nature. So I tell you about my second home, a different world that just happens to overlap with the one we know. I tell him of my tree, introduce them though when I split and fell from the trunk, she came with me. I can feel her thrumming in my veins, living at the back of my mind as I did hers. 

And then, rather suddenly, it’s morning and the sun is beginning to creep over us. I feel it seep into my skin, warming to the core of me, thawing the stiffness of my bones. I’m reminded of all the times I’d felt like this in the past, only ever when I’d catch sight of you after long weeks apart. I smile with the memories, hoping they’ll burn out all the frostbitten ones. If I keep by your side long enough, I think maybe they will. 

“Come with us,” you whisper against my skin. I’d dozed some minutes ago, snoring into the hot skin of your neck. You shake me lightly. “Come with me to Kaer Morhen.”

My eyes snap open and I’m looking up at you a little too hopefully. “You aren’t leaving me?”

“No.” Something in your eyes steels over. The grip on my side tightens, and with a surprising but gentle manoeuvre, I’m sitting astride your lap. I’m groggy from a sleepless night and endlessly confused, but you hold my hips and nose into my space, saying, “I’m never planning to leave you again. Not if I can help it.”

“Geralt?” But you kiss me silent and I think perhaps I understand. Your hands are still at my waist but I thread my own into your hair, tugging you closer. I want to hear you say it, though. I _need_ to hear you say it, so I pull back gasping, and am delighted to see your lips chase after mine, eyes still closed. “Geralt, what are you saying?”

You blink open slowly, eyes soft, lips and cheeks ruddy. There’s another quirk in your lip, and I resist the urge to lick into it. “I’m saying follow me, bard. To the ends of the earth, forever.”

With a smirk, I lean in and murmur against your lips, “I already have,” then laugh as you growl and kiss me hungrily again. 

We’re startled apart only because across the clearing from us awakes the sleeping girl. She seems almost more upset for having caught us than we are having been caught, as she grumbles away to the brook, “for a drink and some bloody peace.” 

We laugh into each other, my forehead resting against your shoulder, yours against my chest. I feel suddenly giddy, like all the love I’ve ever felt for you is bubbling up beneath my skin ready to explode. I don’t know where to put it, what to do with it, but in a move that’s almost unconscious, it begins pouring out of me. Flowers bloom in the grass around us, the crack in my tree heals, and the air fills with the sweet scent of lavender and honey. I feel you stiffen beneath me, taken aback, but then all at once, I’m being crushed to you in a fierce hug.

“Me too,” you whisper in my ear. “I, you- me too.”

“I know,” I whisper back, smiling. I press a kiss to your head and shut my eyes. “I know.”

**Author's Note:**

> Frankly, I was a little worried about writing this. My previous work was really meant to be a standalone vent-piece, one I had written and posted in a fit of drunkenness. But the response was startling; so many of you wanted to follow the story, see if there might be a happy ending waiting for our two idiots. Part of me wanted to just leave it because sometimes we don't get that big resolution, and from where I was when I wrote it, I couldn't see mine. A few weeks later, I realised that just because _I_ don't get a happy ending doesn't mean _these two_ shouldn't.
> 
> I have another fic in the works right now, also from Jaskier's POV. It's a long one, with adventure, betrayal, forgiveness, laughter, magic, and Lots of Communication! I don't have a timeline for when it'll be finished, but regardless, stay tuned! 
> 
> Okay, that's my spiel. You know the drill: kudos and comments feed my creativity. But no pressure! Lots of love to you all! x


End file.
